


I know it gets hard sometimes, but I could never leave you, no matter how I tried

by 1000lux



Category: Justified
Genre: Alternate Ending, Fix-It of Sorts, Fugitive Number One, Happy Ending, M/M, S6E11, Spoilers for season 6, hospital bed conversation, quotes from the show
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-04
Updated: 2016-07-04
Packaged: 2018-07-19 21:22:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7377847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1000lux/pseuds/1000lux
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written after watching the hospital scene with Raylan and Boyd in S6E11. Because, Jesus, there were so many feelings in that conversation!</p>
            </blockquote>





	I know it gets hard sometimes, but I could never leave you, no matter how I tried

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I own no rights the series, the books or the characters.
> 
> Yay, finally my first Justified fanfic. After I've had tons of unfinished ideas lying around on my pc, I finally go to finishing this one.
> 
> The quotes are taken from Wikiquote.
> 
> The title is from the song 'Better than I know myself' by Adam Lambert.

I know you care  
I know it's always been there

I know you care  
I see it in the way that you stare  
As if there's trouble ahead and you knew it  
I'll be saving myself from the ruin

I know it wasn't always wrong

Cause this is how things ought to have been  
And I know the worst of it wasn't all that it seemed

But I still hope

(Ellie Goulding - I know you care)

****

"I gave you what you always wanted, Raylan... Boyd Crowder bleeding at your feet."

"I'm gonna come after you."

"I know."

And maybe Ava realised why that was. Maybe she realised it that moment, just like Raylan realised it. Because of Boyd Crowder bleeding at his feet.

Ava started the car. There was really nothing left for her in Harlan. Maybe there'd never been.

*

Again Boyd had cheated death. Raylan visited him in the hospital. And for once there wasn't the serene I-don't-care attitude. For once there was just pain and raw emotion. For once, Boyd being the one who'd been pushed too far, the one who'd been taken by surprise.

"You're not the one who shot him, are you?" The doctor asked.

"No, I'm the one who got him here." 

"Ain't exactly true, is it?"

"Well, I called it in, made sure they knew you were emergent." Raylan's smile strained his face.

"You handcuffed me to a bumper, you left me there without so much as a fare-thee-well. 

"You could hear the sirens on their way. Must have given you some solace."

~  
Raylan sank to the ground beside Boyd, checking for his pulse. He called in an ambulance, then he started putting pressure on the wound. When he started hearing the sirens, Boyd opened his eyes and Raylan shrank away from him, scrambling to his feet. As in afterthought, he turned back and cuffed one of Boyd's hands to the bumper.  
When he eventually had to stop, sliding to the forest ground, his back against a tree, he could still see the lights of the arriving ambulance. He kept sitting there for another ten minutes, his head between his knees, before he shakily got back to his feet and called Art.  
~

"Gotta suck, be that close to the prize, have it shot out of your hand. I kinda know how you feel."

"No, you don't." Boyd returned with unusual fervor. Raylan had known Boyd to be mad at him, to be angry. But this was different. Who could blame him? "I don't believe in a world where you know how I feel."

"I didn't realize disappointment was a domain exclusive unto Boyd Crowder."

"Well, Raylan, if we're gonna play it that simple, then let's talk about your disappointments. What disappoints you, Raylan Givens? The fact that you weren't the one who got to shoot me?"

Boyd was so angry. So disappointed. At Raylan of all people. He seemed so shaken. Off balance and helpless, maybe for the first time in his life.

"I never wanted to shoot you, Boyd. You were the one who made me do it. The last time, and if it had gotten this far this time, it would have been on you again."

"Well, isn't that a very easy way of making the world look exactly as you want it to be, Raylan? Why don't you just admit that you want to win?"

"Like you don't want that, Boyd. At some point it was clear that there'd never be a reasonable solution to our problem. You didn't let there be one. I didn't come back to Harlan with the intention of putting a bullet in your chest. You were the one who forced my hand." Why had their relationship always have to be so difficult? Never any clearly defined lines. The edges of the old friendship still too close for Raylan to make a decision he had never had any problems making before. Why had neither of them ever been able to shake it off? Even now, when everything between them had been continuously getting worse, building up to a blow-up that was unavoidable at one point. Things had been good between them when he got back, even after he'd shot Boyd. Things had been great, compared to what they were like now. And then they'd both started to unravel, coming apart at the seams, until nothing seemed to make sense anylonger and everything seemed justified.

"You might not believe it, Raylan, but I had never, at any point, the wish to kill you."

"Right." Raylan scoffed at that.

Boyd's face went very still, angry even.

"You don't know what's in my heart."

"What heart?" Raylan wasn't sure why he had to lash out like that. Why he had to strife to be especially hurtful. Boyd had a heart, even though no one had been able to hit it so far. The pain in his face wasn't from the gunshot wound.

"You don't know what's in your own heart." Boyd replied, coldly, disdainfully. "You've given up everything you are so that you could murder me." When he continued, the disdain in his voice wasn't for Raylan anylonger. "I know about having given up everything I believed in. Trust me about that. And now, I'm wondering what for."

Yes. Raylan, felt himself nodding numbly. Boyd was right. Raylan had strayed so far from his path, that he could barely distinguish himself from the men he hunted. The only difference seemed to be his righteous goal. Why had it been so important to stop Boyd, of all people? He was hardly the worst of what was out there.

Getting Boyd was all that kept him in Kentucky.

"I'm gonna get outta here, Raylan." Boyd looked at him so defiantly, despite the state he was in.

"Mm-hmm."

And Raylan honest to God hoped he would. Not anylonger so he could kill him with his own hands though. Even though that's the lie he'd been living with for those past weeks.

He had realised it during the trick with the money truck. When he'd almost called off the whole thing. Getting cold feet so short before the finish line. He didn't want it to be over. Not with Boyd with a bullet in his chest. Not with Boyd in jail for the rest of his life.  
He'd thought that's what he wanted but it wasn't.

~  
"I been lying to you, Boyd. Keeping up the fiction that I got all manner of things tying me to Kentucky. Things that forestall my moving to Florida. But there is only the one thing: You."  
"You wanna lean in for a kiss?"  
~

Raylan grabbed Boyd and pressed him into the pillows, crashing their lips together in a bruising kiss that was the culmination their dance had tethered towards to from the very beginning. Raylan only felt distantly as his hat fell down, but he felt the fingertips that brushed into his hair, as if they burned themselves into his scalp, one hand digging into his neck almost strong enough to bruise, but pulling closer, not pushing away. All the while the only thought that scorched through his mind was, why the hell they hadn't done this earlier. Every single moment had led up to this. It could have happened every single time. When Boyd walked out of that church. When Boyd stumbled into his motel room, before Bulletville. In Bulletville, when Boyd told him that he was the only friend he had left in this world. Hell, it felt like they had only been moments away from it back then in the mine.

He hadn't realised he'd come half to lie on top of Boyd, until the other pushed him away.

"Ow! Fuck. Raylan, you're hurting me." Boyd looked at him, out of breath, one hand clutching to the bandage around his chest, the hospital gown no longer where it used to be, partly bunched up in Raylan's hand.

Raylan let go of him, coming out of the daze that had made him kiss another man, a criminal in a hospital. With his colleagues just waiting outside the door. Backed away from the bed, one hand unsteadily wiping across his mouth, while his eyes where still locked with Boyd's.

He had his answer now. For all the things that had went down between them. For whatever power had unfailably tied him to Harlan. What their problem was. Had been. Not the money. Not Ava. What had Zachariah said? They'd played her, used her, for their own war against each other.

He had his answer. He just didn't know what to do with it.

"I'm gonna get outta here, Raylan!" Boyd called after him.

*

Vasquez looked at him with a mix of bitter disappointed and consdescension.

"You realise we won't get him on this, right? What am I supposed to arrest him for? We know the money belongs to Avery Markham, but he isn't going to press charges, seeing as he wants to finish this himself. Am I supposed to arrest him for having been shot in the chest?!"

"So, he's walking free?" Raylan asked. He'd expected, only, maybe 24 hours ago, that this would fill him with infinite frustration, make him even more driven, making him lose the last bit of control he still possessed. "When does he get released?"

"He already released himself. Against the doctor's advice. I assume to Ms. Crowder's house."

"You're not having him watched?"

"No. Our priority is your girlfriend. And I won't waste money and manpower so she can escape."

*

"Boyd."

The man looked up from the glass of undecipherable booze he was just having. Not the typical jar this time, but a bottle Raylan hadn't seen before.

"Shouldn't you be lying down?"

"Why, Raylan, since when are you so concerned with my health?" Boyd smiled, but it seemed as forced as any show of bravado Raylan had put up since Boyd had been shot.

Raylan sat down against the table, beside Boyd, drinking the next shot Boyd'd poured himself.

"So, they let you go."

"I assumed you wouldn't be too happy about that, but, by the state laws, I am a free man." Boyd leaned back in his chair, eying Raylan curiously, wrily. "So, Raylan, have you come to finish this business between us then?"

"I'm not going to shoot you, Boyd."

Boyd shook his head, laughing lightly.

"I wasn't talking about that."

Raylan balked, looking at Boyd both with apprehension and disbelief.

"Is that what you think this is, another one of your love stories?"

"What would you say, if I said it was?" Boyd offered a smile. Not as wide and all engulfing as usual. Not as fake either. Honest. Unsure. A secret shared between them. An offer. His eyes shifted, regarding Raylan, knowingly, shaking his head with a little laugh. "Raylan Givens, I know you have never believed a word that has come out of my mouth, though I have harbored the secret hope that you have nevertheless enjoyed hearing them."

Raylan didn't know what to return to that, what he wanted to return to that. The words that Boyd offered, that could have been nothing but a joke, given their rapport, despite making so much sense. What else could it be? What else had it ever been? What had Carol Johnson said?

~  
"The truth is, I don't know if you can trust Boyd to have your back but, well, he has tried to kill me, and I have shot him, and imprisoned him and I wouldn't be surprised if our paths again cross in such a manner. Even though, he has had my back on two occasions. Once was on my last day in the mine, and the other not so long ago."  
"My, sounds like a love story."  
~

Boyd continued, "And if you're honest to yourself, that's the only other way this is going to end, other than one of us dead."

Raylan grabbed Boyd's hand and pulled him upstairs to the bedroom. The bedroom he'd slept with Ava in. The bedroom Boyd had slept with Ava in. They both fell to the bed, Boyd wincing at the impact.

Maybe for the moment it was okay to let go of reason. What kind of reason was there to be had in Harlan anyway? Maybe at this point neither of them had the energy anylonger for pretense. Maybe they'd both run out of patience for this game. The game they'd both been playing for too long, without realising either the rules or the stakes.

*

They lay there in the bed. The darkness shone in through the window. Both of them lying in silence in the aftermath of everything. Boyd had looked out of that window countless times. Never would he have thought that he'd lie here with Raylan. Had he wished for it? Maybe the last time when he was still foolish nineteen. He liked to think he'd gotten wiser since then, more realistic. Even though, it had been true joy he'd felt when Raylan had come back. Mixed with anger and the desperate wish to prove a point.

~  
Would you shoot me, Raylan?  
You make me pull, I put you down.  
~

Proven his point he had. Little good it'd done him. They had just continued from there, more friends than enemies. Treading around each other with empty threats. It had been maddening, always scratching at the surface, knowing there was something there and yet, nothing ever coming of it.  
It had been the only way things could have been at the point they'd both been in life. They'd just run with it. No one really able to change the direction.  
Boyd just had known one thing for sure, he wasn't willing to give up his criminal empire for Raylan Givens. Even though, at times, he'd been almost willing to do so.

And here they were. With everything gone to pieces, Raylan had decided to make his fucking move.

Raylan turned around to Boyd, regarding him closely. "Are you okay?" He ran a hand over Boyd's bandaged chest, in a gesture that was more tender than anything that'd ever been between them.

Embarrassingly enough something like a sob escaped Boyd.

I wanna be yours, Raylan Givens, Boyd thought. But he didn't say it.

"I'll live, Raylan." The pain in his chest nonwithstanding– The pain in his chest. Ha. Hadn't there always been a pain in his chest when it came to Raylan Givens?

Boyd kissed him hard. Because everything else wasn't in the cards. Raylan broke the kiss, pulling Boyd close, arms almost too tight around him, one of his hands in his hair.

"Shit. I think I love you. Boyd Crowder. Fuck. That's the only way this makes sense."

"But it does." Boyd whispered. "Doesn't it?"

Raylan nodded against Boyd's shoulder.

*

Vasquez looked at him angrily. "Just because you're sleeping with Ava Crowder–"

"I'm sleeping with Boyd Crowder." Raylan said. "But that doesn't really make it better, does it? Don't worry, I'll be out of your hair. I'm leaving Harlan for good this time."

Vasquez looked around the room, thunderstruck. 

"You all knew about this!"

Tim shrugged. "It makes sense."

Art looked dumbfounded. "For Christ's sake, Raylan!"

Rachel shook her head. "Thank God, I'm no longer Chief Deputy."

*

"Hell, sometimes, I think the only way to get out of our town alive is to have never been born there." Boyd came down the front porch, squinting against the setting sun.

Raylan took Boyd's duffle bag and put it into the trunk of his car.

"But we are leaving."

"Nothing left here for me." Boyd shrugged with a smile. 

He'd never thought Boyd would really leave. Had expected him to find an excuse, last minute. But here they were. And maybe it had been him finding excuses all along.

Boyd looked into the distance, hand resting on the opened car-door.

"You think they'll ever find her?" Raylan asked, easily guessing who Boyd was thinking of.

"I hope not."


End file.
